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New Dev Blog: Player-owned Customs Office

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Bloodpetal
Tir Capital Management Group
#981 - 2011-10-19 22:05:04 UTC  |  Edited by: Bloodpetal
DECISION TREE



There needs to be a decision tree for these POCO's that's greater than simply "Attack" and then come back in x hours and "Defend".


Do this :


The attacker, if he wants to take the POCO is required to deploy a "Administrative Task Force Shuttle" (I'm having fun here) - that's full of politicians that infiltrate and make the POCO vulnerable to attack. More realistically, some kind of "Planetary Blockade Unit".


It takes 30 minutes from that moment of deploying the Unit for the POCO to become vulnerable to Phase 1 attack. This 30 minute buffer alerts the defenders and allows them to scramble a quick force to defend the POCO, and also forces the attackers to do more than "Drive by" attacks on multiple planets. They have to WANT the POCO down.


Once the POCO is vulnerable to the first attack, it can get taken down to 25% shields and reinforced for the timer the next day. This way the DEFENDERS have a decision and an option to scramble and defend their POCO's, and it forces the attackers to bring assets and an INTENT to "disturb" the Customs offices. There is absolutely no reason that "Pirates" won't just bash POCO's for fun on a boring afternoon. Forcing the attacker to deploy assets and waiting for the time limit to expire limits how much can be "disturbed".


My biggest concern is random Pirates bashing POCO's for fun, getting all the defenders to come defend the next day and not care to show up even - but "Griefing" and "crying wolf" repeatedly just because they can.

Where I am.
Cyniac
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#982 - 2011-10-19 22:06:30 UTC
CCP Omen wrote:

the tax thing is quite complex, (to my own surprise when I took it on) but whenever you do percent, there has to be a value at the bottom to modify with the percent. In the "real" world, customs are paid as actual money for any given commodity. Like for instance, 1kg Banana costs 1 USD or whatever. This is the tariff. This cost, is set by CCP on every single item that can flow to/from planets and the owner of the customs office modifies how much of that value he wants. This value existed before this change as well, and was precisely what you paid for import and export. We have increased it significantly but in turn, the default value is 5% which is the same as before =)

Hope that makes any sense!

Regards
Omen



Not really complex at all.

It would probably be conceptually a simpler idea to charge not an isk fee but a % of goods transferred instead, with the owner of the station having a special corp hangar (maybe bigger than average) where the goods are stored.

This also has a couple of other advantages such as making it so that the value of the structure increases over time up to the point where the owner drops in and empties the "taxes".

Not only is the idea of charging a different tax rate for different security settings a good idea - it would also be very useful to have separate tax rates on the import and export of materials.

Differentiating between the import and export of materials is important because it means that you could allow extraction from a planet, (to a certain sec class) but in essence prohibit turning it into a factory planet (by setting a very high import tax) I could see a corp setting up a small cartel over some of the more valuable PI space doing this.

However this is going to greatly skew PI - WH PI is going to get a massive boost (because PI in a WH is fairly well protected) whereas PI in NPC nullsec is going down the drain.


Final question - why just one customs office if I might ask? I could see the use and value of having these in different sizes too, or having some of the nullsec factions (Syndicate comes to mind, their LP store is not very interesting) provide for some interesting flavours of customs offices.

Anyhow... interesting but it does royally mess up all of my PI right now.
Solo Player
#983 - 2011-10-19 22:08:11 UTC  |  Edited by: Solo Player
NPC (and other) sov holders letting you tariff their planets at no costs?
Are you mad? Or are you planning to cut your utterly neglected backstory altogether anyway in order to include even more game-y feature into your "space simulation" sandbox?

And damn your buggy new forum - I just typed in half an hour of brilliant ideas on how to improve this and when I finally hit "post" it just refreshed the page to the original (empty) state. RAGE!

Also, listen to Issler, she's got it righter than you. Except standings to the sov holder should be relevant, not the local pirate faction.
Tyberius Franklin
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#984 - 2011-10-19 22:14:24 UTC
Solo Player wrote:
NPC (and other) sov holders letting you tariff their planets at no costs?
Are you mad? Or are you planning to cut your utterly neglected backstory altogether anyway in order to include even more game-y feature into your "space simulation" sandbox?

And damn your buggy new forum - I just typed in half an hour of brilliant ideas on how to improve this and when I finally hit "post" it just refreshed the page to the original (empty) state. RAGE!

Also, listen to Issler, she's got it righter than you. Except standings to the sov holder should be relevant, not the local pirate faction.


You are setting tariffs on the goods which pass through the POCO, which excludes rocket launches. Since at that point you would own the POCO, why would you not be able to charge for it's use?
Monger Man
D.S.A.
#985 - 2011-10-19 22:20:14 UTC
Bilaz wrote:
Let me remind you one of devblogs written not so long ago:

fom here http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=2351
Quote:
Lessons learned
1) Shooting at stationary structures is boring
See: Starbase warfare, Dominion sov warfare. Even the good fights that do happen around such objectives could be improved by having better objectives.
Shooting at things with hitpoints scales very efficiently with fleet size, which encourages lag-producing behavior
2) Having to spend significant amounts of effort defeating an enemy which isn't even fighting back is really boring
See: Starbase warfare, Dominion sov warfare. See in particular how long it took to clear IT Alliance's ownership out of Delve, as a recent example
3) Waking up every morning and having to clean up the mess made while you were asleep is boring
See: station ping-pong pre-sov, repairing station services. Having to do something tedious every day before you can actually play the game is not cool
4) Doing something just "because it would be cool/neat/awesome" is always a bad idea and will come back to bite you later
See: Jump bridges, cyno jammers, Sov 4, AoE doomsdays, titans in general, supercarrier boost... Note that we should still obviously strive to make everything cool/neat/awesome, but when we start off with an awesome idea rather than an actual problem we want to fix or a feature that has a clear, functional and necessary goal, it generally requires painful fixes further down the road
5) Cost is a useful variable to tune but an unwise thing to rely on to enforce scarcity or balance - players will always be richer than you think
See: outposts, titans, supercarriers
6) Making something tedious will not stop players doing it if it's very clearly the best option. They'll do it, and they'll hate it
See: everything involving starbases. As a counterpoint though, things like the one-per-corp-per-system-per-day starbase rule demonstrate that if something doesn't make a big difference but is sufficiently awkward to do, then any theoretical "exploit" scenarios tend to fall out of favor quickly as they're just not worth the effort.
7) People like to do one-stop shopping, and will "go to Jita" for everything unless doing so is comparatively very inconvenient
See: moon mineral distribution, high-strength booster resource distribution, neither of which achieved much in the way of the nullsec-to-nullsec trade that they hoped to encourage


now to your new customs office
1) check. Its sure stationary and we kinda expected to shoot it
2) check. it surely wont fight back
3) check. Yeah - at night someone reinforced it and you HAVE to rep it up
4) check. We dont really need it, now do we?
5) check. It cost much more than most people get from pi and taxes are going up
6) check. We have to get bpc, build one thing, haul it, then do something with it again - with no reasoning behind it

so you repeat 6 out of 7 mistakes you folks supposedly learned? Good job as always.


I have to say I cant disagree with this.
At first I read the blog and smiled. Thinking of all the possibilities in lowsec.
But then realized why I haven't bothered with a pos, defense, fueling, tedious, and for what?
So I can research blue prints? Or haul crap in and out? I have 4 planets in lowsec right now.
I spend little time on them, the hauling is just boring as hell. Most likely I'll wont be doing it at all
with this change.
Solo Player
#986 - 2011-10-19 22:34:33 UTC
Ok. I'll try once more. Forum better not eat it this time.

problem: your proposition for POCOs just adds another largely seperate minigame to the EVE that is easily exploited and doesn't make sense in the gameworld you have

goal: mesh this new feature with what you already have in away that makes sense and offers interesting new gameplay

solution (for low sec and npc nullsec):
- require minimum standings towards system sov holder in order to apply for the privilege of tariffing a planet
- players apply for a "letter of privilege" to tariff a planet for a set amount of time (one month?) as a corp at the planet's regular customs office.
- applying corps will offer a certain share of claimed tariffs to the sov holder
- letter of privilege for the next time period will go to the highest offer (modified by the corp's standings) at the time the current letter runs out.
- if the current holder isn't successful, their POCO will unanchor at that time.
- the letter of privilege further costs a basic fee dependent on system sec to be deposited upon application.
- corps/alliances may shoot and disable war targets' POCOs
- shooting/disabling (griefing) of non-war target POCOs is possible, at the risk of a system sec-dependent Concord reaction.
- when no operational POCO is in orbit, a sov-holder operated conventional customs office is open for business at high sec conditions.
- possibly further allow shooting/disabling of sov holder npc customs office at increased risk of Concord reaction. import/export would then be limited to direct launches until said customs office auto-regenerates after a while.

advice: a sandbox balances itself if factors are sufficiently interdependent. don't listen to whiners fearing the need to adapt their strategies. players will adapt as long as it includes some measure of fun.
Kar DeMerchant
Imperial Shipment
Amarr Empire
#987 - 2011-10-19 22:38:01 UTC
First, I would like to thank the devs for giving large alliances one more way to drive small alliances into the ground.

On the other hand, so long as we small alliances can still ninja any planet regardless of sec status or sov holder it might not be so bad.

I am getting very tired of CCP making decisions based on what makes sense for PL and the other mega alliances and neglecting the little guy.
Solo Player
#988 - 2011-10-19 22:58:22 UTC
Tyberius Franklin wrote:

You are setting tariffs on the goods which pass through the POCO, which excludes rocket launches. Since at that point you would own the POCO, why would you not be able to charge for it's use?



Because the sov holders' services of policing the system and providing infrastructure is usually provided at the cost/incentive of taxing and tariffing those services' beneficiaries. If they subcontracted their privilege to someone else, they'd be sure to get something out of it, wouldn't they?
Tyberius Franklin
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#989 - 2011-10-19 23:10:28 UTC  |  Edited by: Tyberius Franklin
Solo Player wrote:
Tyberius Franklin wrote:

You are setting tariffs on the goods which pass through the POCO, which excludes rocket launches. Since at that point you would own the POCO, why would you not be able to charge for it's use?



Because the sov holders' services of policing the system and providing infrastructure is usually provided at the cost/incentive of taxing and tariffing those services' beneficiaries. If they subcontracted their privilege to someone else, they'd be sure to get something out of it, wouldn't they?


I'm not sure where any policing can been seen or benefit us. As far as the infrastructure, the colonies and soon the POCO will be player owned. There will be no NPC involvement. What you are proposing is a considerably different system. CCP is proposing that that the role once filled by NPC structures be done away with and totally replaced by structures built and operated by us. What you propose is more like subcontracting the existing resources instead of buying/replacing them, in which case, yes, paying the NPC sov holders would make sense.
Battelle
Warriors of Caldari
The Initiative.
#990 - 2011-10-19 23:22:36 UTC
I waited a while before responding to this to see how the posts went. It's good to see that some folks are actually thinking about the ramifications of this finally. Congrats to Bilaz and his post. I suspect this will probably be the death of PI for the average player but maybe that's what CCP wants if you think about it.
Solo Player
#991 - 2011-10-19 23:33:50 UTC
Tyberius Franklin wrote:

I'm not sure where any policing can been seen or benefit us. As far as the infrastructure, the colonies and soon the POCO will be player owned. There will be no NPC involvement. What you are proposing is a considerably different system. CCP is proposing that that the role once filled by NPC structures be done away with and totally replaced by structures built and operated by us. What you propose is more like subcontracting the existing resources instead of buying/replacing them, in which case, yes, paying the NPC sov holders would make sense.


Granted, but I don't see CCP handing players the reins to the universe at all, actually. New technology, background plots, missions, stargates etc. are still fast in their hands.

Neither do I see the empires do that - they are fighting over worthless space such as Black Rise, why should they just give it to us pretentious/thankless bunch? And they do provide services such as Concord (an empire joint venture), free (why?) stargate transport and probably others.

If it was otherwise, what sense in leaving them sov in low-sec? Why have low-sec at all?
Tyberius Franklin
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#992 - 2011-10-19 23:35:00 UTC
Battelle wrote:
I waited a while before responding to this to see how the posts went. It's good to see that some folks are actually thinking about the ramifications of this finally. Congrats to Bilaz and his post. I suspect this will probably be the death of PI for the average player but maybe that's what CCP wants if you think about it.


The only aspect of this that seems bad globally would be the ability to lock people out based on standings. All other aspects have the same capacity to be self regulating that everything else has. If you want to operate a POCO but not do PI, you don't limit access, you set taxes low and leave it open to anyone. In lowsec this encourages traffic from ninja PI but may ward it away as well due to real time updates letting you know people locations.

I would make a few potential changes though:

1 Seed the BPC's about 1 week prior to removing the CO's to prevent shortages while they are built/deployed
2 Remove standings. I'm sort of torn on this one. It seems bad in my head but I can see that making open ones more lucrative at the same time
3 Instead of having a percentage of a set value per item, charge a fixed amount per cubic meter
4 Don't give wallet ticks in real time and don't identify the specific POCO that was paid. This reduces the POCO's capabilities as a gank tool.
Tyberius Franklin
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#993 - 2011-10-19 23:43:53 UTC  |  Edited by: Tyberius Franklin
Solo Player wrote:
Tyberius Franklin wrote:

I'm not sure where any policing can been seen or benefit us. As far as the infrastructure, the colonies and soon the POCO will be player owned. There will be no NPC involvement. What you are proposing is a considerably different system. CCP is proposing that that the role once filled by NPC structures be done away with and totally replaced by structures built and operated by us. What you propose is more like subcontracting the existing resources instead of buying/replacing them, in which case, yes, paying the NPC sov holders would make sense.


Granted, but I don't see CCP handing players the reins to the universe at all, actually. New technology, background plots, missions, stargates etc. are still fast in their hands.

Neither do I see the empires do that - they are fighting over worthless space such as Black Rise, why should they just give it to us pretentious/thankless bunch? And they do provide services such as Concord (an empire joint venture), free (why?) stargate transport and probably others.

If it was otherwise, what sense in leaving them sov in low-sec? Why have low-sec at all?


If we must broach lore/RP I choose to look at it like a strategic business decision on the part of Concord/the empires. The risks of operating in low/null are too great to likely be able to return a sustainable profit so they scrap the entire low/null/WH(and how did they even operate there?) and let someone else take a stab at it if they so choose. As far as Concord/Empire funding: sales taxes, LP stores, Sov fees(again how?), Highsec POCO taxes, NPC corp taxes and whatever else (+lore elements like economic activity on occupied worlds) and other should be able to keep them afloat I guess.
Rek Seven
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#994 - 2011-10-19 23:59:57 UTC
As a percentage, how much more material is on a low sec planet compared to a high sec planet?

I'm just thinking that if a low sec planet has a 50% better yield than a high sec planet but the this new system restricts high sec tax to 10% max, would it be feasible to set low sec tax to anything above 15%?

I get the impression that people think that the risk of doing PI in low sec does not outweigh the benefit, so perhaps for this to work, low sec pi would need to be buffed significantly to bring it closer inline with that of WH space and PI in null sec should be nerfed to prevent massive alliances from gaining a monopoly over the system...

The wishlist is pretty much complete...
Solo Player
#995 - 2011-10-20 00:02:56 UTC
Tyberius Franklin wrote:

If we must broach lore/RP I choose to look at it like a strategic business decision on the part of Concord/the empires. The risks of operating in low/null are too great to likely be able to return a sustainable profit so they scrap the entire low/null/WH(and how did they even operate there?) and let someone else take a stab at it if they so choose. As far as Concord/Empire funding: sales taxes, LP stores, Sov fees(again how?), Highsec POCO taxes, NPC corp taxes and whatever else (+lore elements like economic activity on occupied worlds) and other should be able to keep them afloat I guess.


Not extremely plausible, now, is it? Coherence is not something that can just be bent any way you happen to please.
If there are other areas where our credulity is hard pressed (oh, and how it is!), those are faults that deserve consideration when you are getting there. Planetary customs are reviewed, and I don't see why plausibility shouldn't be addressed.

Aside from that, my proposals do not reduce the amount of player control - they rather interweave CCP's proposed new functionality more tightly with other existent features. It seems preferrable to have fewer highly interconnected systems than more independent minigames.
Tyberius Franklin
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#996 - 2011-10-20 00:18:06 UTC
Solo Player wrote:
Tyberius Franklin wrote:

If we must broach lore/RP I choose to look at it like a strategic business decision on the part of Concord/the empires. The risks of operating in low/null are too great to likely be able to return a sustainable profit so they scrap the entire low/null/WH(and how did they even operate there?) and let someone else take a stab at it if they so choose. As far as Concord/Empire funding: sales taxes, LP stores, Sov fees(again how?), Highsec POCO taxes, NPC corp taxes and whatever else (+lore elements like economic activity on occupied worlds) and other should be able to keep them afloat I guess.


Not extremely plausible, now, is it? Coherence is not something that can just be bent any way you happen to please.
If there are other areas where our credulity is hard pressed (oh, and how it is!), those are faults that deserve consideration when you are getting there. Planetary customs are reviewed, and I don't see why plausibility shouldn't be addressed.

Aside from that, my proposals do not reduce the amount of player control - they rather interweave CCP's proposed new functionality more tightly with other existent features. It seems preferrable to have fewer highly interconnected systems than more independent minigames.


Agreed on the lore part, but personally I prefer that this take a back seat to playability and enjoyment, not to say that there are no concerns there as well. Anything that adds to the already tedious requirements for various tasks in game is bad which makes me support not tying this to standings or complicating the process of placing or gaining control of one. And while making them another structure grind makes it harder for them to change hands, especially to smaller groups or solo players, it also to some extent deters griefing by making people invest time to destroy a somewhat small investment, making it possible that some people just won't bother and allowing smaller groups to retain what holdings they are able to take.

Also there is a bit of tie in to the rest of the game through how the BPC's are obtained and the units are built/sold as well as how the affect PI product import/export which due to POS fuel alone ties this in abit too well maybe to the rest of the game.
Desert Ice78
Gryphons of the Western Wind
#997 - 2011-10-20 00:21:44 UTC
On the surface, this is a wonderful idea.

But as usual, the players have mearly scratched the surface and revealed all the problems and knock-on effects that CCP hasn't thought of and will point-by-point ignore for the final release.

My major issue, while I really like the concept, the cost is simple going to be crazy. Currently I use 10 planets across two toons, and I'm looking at in excess of 1 bil. build costs.

That is simply too much, especially since the next blob can roll through and blow them all up.

What exactly is the point of building them anyways? They are already there around just about every planet, all we need is a mechanism in order for us to take control of them.

For the cost that is being projected, they need a hell of alot more then just being able to set tax (which will be zero along alliance lines.) At the very least they will need to be able to route goods between planets automatically, with the CC having a hell of alot more grid and CPU.

I am a pod pilot: http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/DesertIce/POD.jpg

CCP Zulu: Came expecting a discussion about computer monitors, left confused.
Desert Ice78
Gryphons of the Western Wind
#998 - 2011-10-20 00:22:20 UTC  |  Edited by: Desert Ice78
snip

I am a pod pilot: http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/DesertIce/POD.jpg

CCP Zulu: Came expecting a discussion about computer monitors, left confused.
Unforgiven Storm
Eternity INC.
Goonswarm Federation
#999 - 2011-10-20 00:49:08 UTC
After reading 50 pages I have to agree that this will not work like intended in low sec.

For 0.0 or wormholes, its fine, deploy (with some minor improvements -> https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=209267#post209267) but for low sec don't deploy this.

---> keep the custom offices there, invulnerable to attacks and RENT them instead, like you rent offices in stations!

In every station in a system in low sec, add a button next to the rent office called rent custom office.
When we press it open a list with all the C. offices that the system has, show information about planet type, how many command centers the planet has, how many ISK will cost to rent the C. Office for 30 days and also show the corp name if any is rented already.

That is it, the rent works like the offices in station, you put it in auto payment, you can cancel payment when you like.

The office belongs to Concord so standings to access it should be according with the standings each user has for Concord. The only thing the renter can change is the C. Office taxes.

To help people to accept this new changes, all c.offices are deactivated until rented.

Also define renting prices based on planet types, the rare ones should be more expensive. Give discounts for corps that have good standings with Concord,

PS: for systems in low sec with no station that we can dock to rent the c. offices I'm out of ideas, but is a small problem and it needs to be solved for this to work properly in all low sec systems.


Some ideas for the future- > Lets assume renting is a success and c.offices aren't available for renting ->>>>>Renting can be done by auction!

- Each office has minimum starting bid and a huge buyout price, the auction time is of 1 day
- The auction starts after the first bid is made.
- Anyone with a command center in the planet where the office is, receives a email with the warning of the auction start
- After 24 hours the winner, rents the office for 30 days
- at any moment of the 24 hours anybody can buyout the rent
- all proposals but the first are secret
- everybody receives mails that a corp x made a bid
- you can only bid once every hour

and that is it, the winner takes the rent, the others receive their money back and a email with the winner name and the ISK it pay for the 30 day rent.

- when the rent ends, if the user has the automatic pay setting for c.offices, the auction starts automatically with the minimum bid and we start the auction process all over again....


Other cool ideas, since you are iterating over PI:

1 - Why not instead of give x5 bonus to links, create a book to train (level 1) that gives that? we really need objectives and more stuff to train in this game, you have a opportunity here use it!

2 - Why not gives us even more books to train that improve PI, like:
- A book that reduces in 5% each level the power consumption of extractor heads
- A book that reduces in 3-5% each level the CPU consumption of PI structures
- A book that reduces in 3-5% each level the power consumption of PI structures
- A book that improves heads yield in 2% each level per hour
- A book that improves production cycles of factories 1 minute per level

GIVE US COOKIES

Unforgiven Storm for CSM 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13. (If I don't get in in the next 5 years I will quit trying) :-)
Solo Player
#1000 - 2011-10-20 00:50:25 UTC  |  Edited by: Solo Player
Rek Seven wrote:
As a percentage, how much more material is on a low sec planet compared to a high sec planet?

I'm just thinking that if a low sec planet has a 50% better yield than a high sec planet but the this new system restricts high sec tax to 10% max, would it be feasible to set low sec tax to anything above 15%?

I get the impression that people think that the risk of doing PI in low sec does not outweigh the benefit, so perhaps for this to work, low sec pi would need to be buffed significantly to bring it closer inline with that of WH space and PI in null sec should be nerfed to prevent massive alliances from gaining a monopoly over the system...



let's see: high sec profits * 1.5 (50% increase) * 0.85 (detract 15% tariffs) / (0.90 (high sec profits - high sec tariffs) equals about 1.4, so there's easily 40% more profit in low sec at the taxes you suggest. even upping those taxes to 40% would still give you profits on a level to high sec. Of course, this does not calculate the difference in risk.

Edit: yay, #1000!